Hudson, Florida

Hudson is a Census Designated Place that was founded in 1878 by Isaac Hudson. He originally called the place Hudson's Landing and established a local post office. In the early 1900's, the Fivay Company moved into the area and started cutting timber to ship by rail to Tampa. The town grew quickly, until Fivay went out of business with the Great Depression. From the 1930's into the 1950's, most of the residents who'd stayed made their living by fishing and shrimping.

A lot of the empty space around that early townsite was bought up by a group of realtors in the late 1950's and they contracted with the US Army Corps of Engineers to have 25 miles of canals blasted out as though the canals were city streets. So began one of Florida's early "canal cities." Once the blasting was done and the heavy landscaping completed, lots along the new waterfront were easy to sell. Those early days saw a lot of mobile homes placed on the lots. These days, the housing community is made up of mostly larger, more affluent homes, although there are still some mobile home parks just inland a bit. And that type of canal construction is now banned by federal and state environmental laws.

Hudson Beach (known officially as Robert J. Strickland Memorial Park) was built in the 1960's. Because so much of Hudson is laid out along the canal system, Hudson Beach is the primary public beach for the area. That's where I took most of the photos on this page.